Yet this journey will soon end. Later this year, Tapierero and her family will move into a new home in a housing project for 50 displaced families in Sibate, a small village an hour south of Bogotá, Colombia’s capital. The project is sponsored by Colombia’s Mennonite Church and supported by Action by Churches Together (ACT), an international alliance of church-based relief agencies, including the United Methodist Committee on Relief (UMCOR).
Now that Tapierero will have a home, she has no interest in going back to the village she fled in the dark of night. “Even if peace were to come someday, I’ll never go back,” she said. “Our life is here now. For the first time in our lives, we’re going to have our own house. That gives me more hope for the future.”
Tapierero and her family are among the fortunate few displaced people in Colombia whose journey has an acceptable—if not happy-ending. Colombia has the highest number of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the Western Hemisphere. According to human-rights groups and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), some two million people—one of every 20 Colombians—have been forcibly driven out of their homes and off their land in the last 15 years. In 1998 alone, more than 288,000 people were forced to flee.
And the problem is getting worse. In August, US President Bill Clinton came to Colombia to symbolically hand over $1.3 billion in aid to Colombian President Andrés Pastrana. The money is for Pastrana’s “Plan Colombia,” an ambitious program to eradicate the production of coca (the plant from which cocaine is manufactured) and end the crippling war with several armed groups. The US aid package—which increases the presence of US troops in Colombia and provides 63 high-tech military helicopters to the Colombian military and police—is based on the logic that stepping up the war will somehow lead to peace. General Fernando Tapias, head of Colombia’s armed forces, summed it up: “There will be peace. But first there will be war.”
The helicopters are being used to expand the military’s presence in the south of the country, where Pastrana’s government is increasing aerial fumigation of coca fields in a California-sized section of the Amazon jungle. Yet critics point out that, despite years of steadily increasing US-financed fumigation, coca production has constantly expanded, growing 28 percent in 1998 and 20 percent in 1999, according to US State Department figures.
“Fumigation is a political obsession of the North Americans, even though it simply doesn’t work,” said Leila Lima, the coordinator in Colombia for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. “Despite the fumigation, coca production has increased. Fumigation has only increased the numbers of internally displaced people and pushed the agricultural frontier deeper into the jungle.”
Antony Sanchez, the director of the Mennonite Development Foundation of Colombia (MENCOLDES), agrees. “It’s difficult to believe that ripping out a few more illicit coca fields is going to solve anything,” he said. “The peasants are just going to move farther into the jungle, cutting down trees in the natural reserves of the Amazon region in order to keep cultivating coca. As long as there is no economic alternative for them, nothing is going to change. Growing coca is the only way they have to survive.”
Observers estimate that the new fumigation, along with increased militarization in the coca-growing regions, will displace an additional 190,000 peasants in coming months. These factors are also expected to heighten tension along Colombia’s borders, as coca production and armed conflict spill over into neighboring Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Venezuela, and Panama. According to Colombia’s immigration department, more than 1000 Colombians per day officially left the country during the first six months of 2000. This represented a 35 percent increase in out-migration over the same period in 1999. Officials estimate that at least 800,000 Colombians are already living as refugees in neighboring countries. And the exodus of Colombians will probably accelerate even more in the future.
Displacement has increased in recent years, as interlocking wars between government forces, left-wing guerrilla armies, and right-wing paramilitary squads have escalated. Every armed group in Colombia has some profitable relation to narco-trafficking. Respect for humanitarian norms regarding noncombatants is scarce. “The concept of civilian just doesn’t exist here,” said Juan Manuel Bustillo, the director of MENCOLDES’ work with IDPs.
Negotiations to end the violence have gotten nowhere. In late 1998, to move along chronically stalled peace talks, the government turned over control of 42,000 square kilometers in the south of the country to the largest guerrilla army, the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Yet the FARC has marred its already poor public image by using the zone to hide kidnap victims and to warehouse stolen cars. Talks with the second-largest guerrilla group, the National Liberation Army (ELN), have made little progress, partly because the government refuses to grant the ELN control of a region similar to that of the FARC.
Bustillo and other observers report that the forced displacement is a byproduct of guerrilla activity, particularly the recruitment of young men by guerrilla armies. Yet in the case of Colombia’s right-wing paramilitary squads, forced displacement seems to be an essential strategy. Funded by drug money and wealthy landowners, the paramilitaries are responsible for roughly two-thirds of all the forced displacements in the country. Several economically strategic areas of Colombia have been taken over by paramilitary squads that massacre civilians. This provokes a massive exodus of local peasants, leaving the affected areas free for investors to develop as they choose.
Rojas, himself an IDP, claims another product of forced displacement is “a violent reconfiguration of land ownership.” This is a sort of anti-agrarian reform that, from 1996 to 1999, drove small and medium-sized producers off more than 4.2 million acres of farmland.
Luz Marina Vargas and her husband had 185 acres of farmland in Bolivar province when they were chased out in 1997. “Do I want to go back? What can I go back to?” Vargas asked. “We’ve heard the paras [paramilitary squads] gave the land to others. We’re supposedly still the owners. We have the legal papers, but they’re worthless because it’s the laws of the paras that matter.” Today Vargas lives in a sprawling slum south of Bogotá.
Displaced farm families often have a difficult time adjusting to life in the city. “What we know is how to plant corn and casava, but where are we going to plant here in the city, where everything is covered by concrete?” asked one displaced peasant. “We’ve not only lost our land, we’ve been forced to trade in our machete and hoe for a backpack in which we can carry around whatever we can beg.”
The Colombian government is theoretically responsible for helping the displaced, but many claim it fails miserably at the task. “It leaves the displaced to fight for scarce resources against other poor people in the country,” said Diego Falla, a government human-rights official in Neiva. Falla’s office, close to the FARC-controlled area, is one of many official agencies where IDPs can go to register with the government under the terms of a 1997 law that was supposed to provide the displaced with benefits and protection. Yet local commissions set up to administer the program lack the funds to do their job well. “There’s no viable solution for these people unless the government dedicates adequate resources to the task,” Falla said, “and so far there’s been no political will to do that.”
As a result of the escalation of violence under the government’s Plan Colombia, church workers are bracing for a new wave of IDPs seeking refuge in Bogotá and other large cities. Yet churches, while stepping up the emergency services they provide for newly displaced families, are also rethinking their relationship with the displaced. To avoid paternalism, many church-based agencies are working to support the efforts of the displaced to resolve their own problems. “We’re helping the displaced to build their own participatory processes—to build real democracy,” said Antony Sanchez.
Bustillo claims the international community has been slow to understand this. “There’s a temptation by foreign donors to see the situation here the same way they see things in parts of Africa,” he said. “Yet we don’t want dependency. The displaced who are organized are clear that they don’t want aid. They want to work and to have their rights protected.”
The displaced “are making a valiant effort to organize themselves and carve out space in the public debate,” said Diana Sanchez, an analyst at the Consulting Group on Human Rights and Displacement (CODHES). “But many have to fight every day for bread for their families, leaving them little energy to fight for political space.”
ACT members have taken on the task of accompanying displaced communities as they fight for “political space.” Just outside Neiva, MENCOLDES staff members have accompanied a group of 143 displaced families who, growing tired of broken government promises, seized a government agency, then a highway. Finally they took over some land just outside the city to install their houses of cardboard and plastic. MENCOLDES provided support ranging from legal advice to money to start a communal kitchen.
Such new forms of accompaniment are dangerous in Colombia. “Providing humanitarian assistance to the displaced is accepted by most people,” said Bustillo. “But when you begin talking about the human rights of the displaced, you’re seen as subversive. Social protest is criminalized in Colombia. One who commits to justice here automatically converts into an enemy of those in power.”
Paul Jeffrey is a United Methodist missionary in Central America, living in Honduras. He wrote this article as part of his coverage of Colombia for Action by Churches Together (ACT).
Text and photographs copyright 2001 by New World Outlook: The Mission Magazine of The United Methodist Church. Used by Permission. Visit New World Outlook Online at http://gbgm-umc.org/nwo/.
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